Category Archives: Education

Impacting Education in Low-Income Countries – by Pearl Kasirye

Educators like Dr. Gillian Kabatereine believe that education is the key to developing young minds and helping them improve their economic circumstances. Dr. Gillian got her PhD in education and curriculum design at Columbia University in New York and returned to East Africa to use her knowledge and skills to make a difference in the education sector.

Expanding DEI in Advertising & PR Education

Landmark Project with Innovative Curriculum, Facilities, and Increase in Faculty Will Transform the Next Generation of Advertising and PR Professionals 

The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, (UT) and Knoxville-based advertising agency Tombras have partnered to create a first-of-its-kind landmark program and investment plan to modernize and expand advertising and public relations education. 

Key goals for the newly named Tombras School of Advertising and Public Relations, which will be housed in UT’s College of Communication and Information, are to double the number of Black, Indigenous, and people of color entering those industries after graduating from UT and to help make advertising and public relations industry demographics more representative of state and national populations.

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Diversity and Speech No. 28: Teaching Diversity across Generations at Harvard – by Carlos E. Cortés and Joseph Zolner

A Co-Authored Interview

Carlos:  Joe, it’s been more than two decades since we started working together at the Harvard Summer Institutes for Higher Education.  Lots of continuities, but also lots of changes.

Joe: Yes, I first attended your sessions on diversity in higher education in the late 1990’s.

Carlos: Even through I’d been doing diversity workshops for a couple of decades, using the Harvard case study method was a brand new experience.

Joe: The Harvard Graduate School of Education’s summer programs have a distinctive leadership development structure.  Very immersive, retreat-like experiences for cohorts of a hundred or so higher education administrators.  I recall framing your early sessions as “diversity and community.”

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Diversity and Speech No. 27: Training Future Psychologists Using the Lens of History – by Carlos E. Cortés, Marjorie Graham-Howard

A Co-Authored Interview

Carlos: Marjorie, as a historian, I was blown away by the richness of your class syllabus.  How did you come up with the idea of using history to ground a clinical psychology course?

Marjorie: I was a history major in college, so I have always loved it.  I remember when I first discovered that history is not just facts about wars and dead people, but was an interpretation of past events.  Then I began to learn that most history was controlled by those with power and privilege, which meant there were those whose voices were silenced or never heard from.  I knew it would be important for therapists.  Once I began teaching at Azusa Pacific University, I found that students were often overwhelmed when working with older adults and clients from a different historical era.  They did not know their history, which became a barrier to providing effective treatment.  We decided to add a class to close this gap.

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The exam paper that stumped all – by Mona Bopanna

How will India respond in 2022 to this regressive stance towards women?

In December, 2021, millions of secondary school students in India appeared for their Class X (Grade 10) exams conducted by the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE).

Since its inception in the 1920s, the Board has gone through several changes and emerged as one of the largest such organisations in the world, with more than 25,000 school — based in India and other countries — affiliated to it. Each year, about 2 million students take the secondary board exams.

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Equity, Social Justice and Education – by Godson Chukwuma, Joseph Nwoye, Katina Webster

As the debate rages on the extent of equity and social justice for all, two perspectives are emerging. On the one hand, the traditional school of thought represents people who believe that things are going well and that the system operates well based on their conception of equity and social justice for all. These traditionalists assert that our system is fair and that it works as it is supposed to do. They further claim that the system’s operation aligns with the founding fathers’ statements in the 1776 Declaration of Independence. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that their Creator endows them with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

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Diversity and Speech Part 22: The Critical Race Theory Donnybrook – by Carlos E. Cortés

A year ago, who would have predicted that Critical Race Theory (CRT) would have become a 2021 national buzz word?  A buzz word for those attacking it.  A buzz word for those defending it.    Probably with relatively few of those attackers and defenders actually having read much of it.

I have, but it’s not easy going.  Lots of ideas.  Lots of jargon.  Lots of obscurantist legal analysis.  But if you stick with it, CRT can be very thought-provoking.

CRT is based on a simple premise: the law is not neutral.  As a result, institutions and systems that arise from the law will not be neutral.   When Mark Twain asked a friend to explain his position on a controversial issue, the friend answered, “I’m neutral.”  To which Twain responded, “Then whom are you neutral against?”

Continue reading Diversity and Speech Part 22: The Critical Race Theory Donnybrook – by Carlos E. Cortés

Is Education the Answer? – by Gay Moore

Nearly every day I receive pleas to aid the less fortunate. Like many Americans, I give to a number of organizations from the local food bank to Doctors Without Borders.

Citizens of the United States are the most charitable people in the world! Collectively, Americans give over $292 billion, 1.44% of GDP (2019,) each year to charitable organizations! This figures do not include the millions of hours of volunteer service.

Canada is the second most charitable country, giving 0.77% of GDP, with the United Kingdom third at 0.54% of GDP. Many countries do not have a history of charitable giving. Instead, their citizens depend on religious institutions and the state to care for those in need.

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Maybe Some Silver Linings – by Gay Morgan Moore

The world will long remember the past year!  We were thrust into circumstances that will forever change us individually and globally. We know the results – over 530,000 dead in the United States alone, millions sickened, an economy in free fall struggling to recover, a severely challenged health care system, new medicines, new disease conditions, and trillions of dollars in government spending attempting to ameliorate the effects of this global pandemic. The list of negative consequences goes on. But are there some “silver linings?” Is there some good coming from this daunting and often frightening global challenge?
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The Changing IT Arena – by Sridhar Rangaswamy

2021 Cyberspace Trends

Many thanks to Deborah Levine, editor of the American Diversity Report, for assisting in sharing my work with the ADR. I’ve been part of IT field for a long time and have presented on Big Data, technology in education. I have also been part of Takelessons.com in teaching SQL.

  I used to teach RDBMS for new employees in 1998, then taught in Oracle University on RDBMS, SQL in 1999-2003. I have taught also PeopleSoft University on the Workflow. And have taught as a Mentor for Cyber Patriot in the year 2019 locally in Summerville, SC. Let’s take a look at how IT has evolved and what’s coming up in the future.

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